🚗 Ola’s New Venture
Ola is set to roll out its grocery delivery service through the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) within the next few days. Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO of Ola, aims to diversify the company's e-commerce offerings and capture a significant share of the online food ecosystem. Currently, Ola processes between 15,000 to 20,000 food orders per day, making it the second-largest buyer-side platform after Magicpin in this category.
📈 Capturing Market Share
According to a report by Moneycontrol, Ola enables more than 30% of ONDC food orders in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR. The company aims to use its core logistics expertise to offer electric vehicle-based logistics services at competitive prices to smaller sellers on the ONDC network. This strategy is expected to help Ola capture a larger market share in the immediate term.
🏃♂️ Competitors and Challenges
With this new venture, Ola will face competition from Pai Platforms (Paytm Ecommerce), Swiggy’s Instamart, and Blinkit. This is not Ola's first attempt at grocery delivery. The company launched a standalone food delivery app in 2015 but discontinued it after nine months. In 2021, Ola reintroduced grocery delivery with Ola Dash in Mumbai and Bengaluru, only to wind down operations a year later.
🤝 Strengthening ONDC Ties
This new development comes as Ola deepens its partnership with ONDC, offering last-mile logistics services across all categories, including food delivery, grocery shopping, and pharmaceuticals. ONDC has been expanding its services, with a 23% month-on-month increase in transactions recorded in May, totaling 8.9M transactions across retail and ride-hailing segments. Companies like Paytm, PhonePe, and Delhivery have also integrated some services with ONDC.
Will Ola's grocery delivery succeed this time?
